I just sat through another church service. My cousin’s kid’s baptism. Big deal for my auntie, you know? The whole extended family there, everyone dressed up, ushers in their suits, the whole bit. My parents, they’re thrilled. Me? I’m just trying not to zone out. This time though, it hit different. The pastor, he’s up there, talking about God’s benevolence. How he provides. How he cares for his flock. All the usual stuff. And I’m looking around. At my parents, who are still working their asses off, cleaning offices overnight, even though they should be retired. My dad’s got that tremor now. Carpal tunnel, probably. But he won’t stop. Can’t stop. Then I think about our block. Our neighborhood. All these families. The guys I work with. We’re out there every damn day. Sun, rain, whatever. Building these high-rises. Luxury apartments. Fucking condos no one on our street could ever afford. We’re honest. We’re hardworking. We pay our taxes. We go to our churches, our mosques, our temples. Whatever. But everyone here is struggling. CONSTANTLY. My buddy, Marco, his kid just got sick again. Another hospital bill they can’t cover. My sister, she’s barely making rent, working two jobs. My parents, like I said. This isn’t some temporary slump. This is… perpetual. It’s been this way since I was a kid. Since my parents came here, actually. So I’m sitting there, listening to this guy talk about a loving God, and I’m just… confused. If God is so good, so powerful, why are we always on the knife's edge? Why do we have to fight so hard for every single goddamn thing, just to stay afloat? While the people who own these buildings we’re putting up — they just get richer? Are we being punished? For what? Being born here? Having parents who worked their fingers to the bone to give us a shot? It’s not anger, really. Not exactly. It's more like a cognitive dissonance. A profound lack of congruence between what I’m being told and what I’m actually seeing. Is that weird? Does everyone feel this sometimes? This fundamental disconnect? Like, if this benevolent deity exists, his operating model seems pretty fucked up from where I’m standing. My mom, she says it’s God’s test. To build character. To show faith. But what kind of test is this? Where the honest, good people just keep getting ground down? Is that character-building? Or just… a slow degradation? I don’t know. I just kept looking at my dad’s hands, folded in prayer. Calloused, scarred. And I thought about all the things those hands built. All the sacrifices. And I just wanted to scream. Not at God. Just… into the void. Like, what the fuck is this about? Really.